Au natural.

For no apparent reason, I suddenly had the overwhelming urge to share with you all the natural, chemical-free stuff that I use on a regular basis.

Hair

Washing

I currently mix 2-3tsp of baking soda with 8oz of water. Don't laugh; I mix it in the peri bottle I got from the hospital when I had Raiden. And I only use about 1/4 of the bottle when I wash my hair.

This took a lot of trial and error, and seems to have finally decided to work perfectly, after I cut nearly a foot of hair off my head. My long hair seemed to feel like there was build-up on it a lot, and my short hair doesn't at all. I don't know if my long hair was damaged or just not rinsing cleanly or what, but it felt yucky, and I'd still have to use shampoo every fourth shampoo or so to get rid of it.

Since getting the hair whacked off, I haven't used shampoo once. The way it gets dirty now is completely different than how it got dirty before. With shampoo, you're stripping away your body's natural oils and your scalp freaks out and overcompensates by making itself more oily. With baking soda, it just sort of removes the excess oil without stripping anything, and it feels like a cleaner oil. I can go 3-4 days without washing at this point, and even when it starts looking like it needs to be washed, it doesn't look gross, and it doesn't feel dirty when I run my hands through my hair. Just a totally different world.

Conditioning

About 2tbsp of apple cider vinegar (ACV) in about 8oz of water. Typically I slosh some ACV into a cup and hold the cup up to the shower head until it looks like about a cup or so. After washing and rinsing well with the baking soda, I pour the entire cup of water over my head, massage it in, and let it set until I'm ready to rinse it out. My hair is the softest it's ever been.

I have definitely learned to use a higher quality, more natural ACV. Braggs is good, though there was another natural, organic variety right next to it at the health food store for a dollar or two cheaper, so I got that instead. Before, I used Kroger brand cheap ACV, and it made my hair feel really oily. Also the smell isn't as strong, and goes away faster, with the higher quality ACV. Yes, the smell goes away when it dries. It kind of smells like, um, nothing.

Styling

This is a recent one. I tried making homemade flax seed hair gel (boil flax in water and then strain; I've seen varying amounts of flax/water suggested online). Hahaha, fail. Trying to "strain" this mixture of goo was absolutely ridiculous and looked totally inappropriate, dripping out the bottom of the strainer. I'll say it: I nicknamed it "flax jizz." I was able to salvage enough to put in a little bottle and it doesn't suck to use, but oh man, not a process worth repeating. I saw a suggestion somewhere online that said to put the flax in some old nylons and then boil, so you don't have the problem with straining, but we'll see.

My next try -- lemon hairspray -- worked much better. Cube one lemon, or orange, or half of each (something, somewhere said that the orange is better for dry hair) (I used a large lemon), and boil it in 2 cups of water until the amount is reduced by half; strain and pour into a spray bottle. This, I love. I probably ought to strain it a little more thoroughly, as a bit of pulp came through the wire mesh strainer, but I'm not bothered by it enough to do anything about it.

I've used this a few times now, both having sprayed it on when my hair was wet and letting it dry along with it, and spraying it on when dry, and it seems to work well either way. It's just enough to keep the flippy-outty part of my hair from falling flat, and helps it keep some of the wave, without feeling yucky later.

Coloring

I use henna, instead of dye. Check out http://www.hennaforhair.com/ for all kinds of info. The color looks more natural (it stains each hair individually rather than dying it one certain shade, so there's still a natural color variance), it makes your hair stronger and softer, and it's an anti-fungal, which means anti-dandruff. I mix mine with tea (what kind depends on what mood I'm in, but it's been apple-chamomile the past few times), and you can get a different color shade depending on what you mix it with, as well. Turns out mixing it with chamomile is supposed to make it more golden. I wish I'd read that before I mixed it with chamomile and hoped it'd turn out a cooler red rather than warmer. Oh well, now I know.

Face

You'll see some repeats here.

Washing

The same baking soda and water mixture I use on my hair. I squirt some on a wash rag, and wash my face. The end.

Toning

A 50/50 mixture of ACV and water. I keep a mixture in a tiny Gladware tub in my medicine cabinet, and dip in a corner of a wash rag then run it over my face.

Moisturizing

Raw, unrefined coconut oil, with a few drops of Rose essential oil and Sweet Orange essential oil. Coconut oil is good for pretty much everything and is supposed to be a good anti-wrinkle product, too. Rose oil is good energy, sweet orange oil is supposed to be energizing, and mostly, I just like the combination of scents. I'll use a little of the mixture for lip gloss every now and then, too.

Deodorant

Another repeat: while I'm slathering the 50/50 ACV/water mixture over my face, I do the same for my underarms. The acidity in the ACV raises your pH so bacteria can't grow. No body odor. No chemicals giving me breast cancer. I still sweat (it's not an anti-perspirant), it's just not stinky.

---

Next up, I want to try making my own natural bug repellent from essential oils as seen here (at the bottom) and here. The little one and I can attract every chigger and mosquito within a 12 mile radius. My poor kid, he even had chigger bites on his scrotum recently. I can't imagine that would be pleasant.

I'm looking into some natural flea remedies today, too, as I don't like the idea of spraying my cats or carpet with chemicals and poisons that "should" be safe when they dry. So far I've found Diatomaceous Earth that I could sprinkle around the house, and a few more natural options to use in/on the pet, that I need to do a bit more looking on, but it's a good starting point.

The no-penis discovery.

I've been waiting for this age and this discussion, and it was as cute and hilarious as I expected.

Raiden has been practicing going peepee standing up (and there is much less cleaning up afterwards involved nowadays than when we first started this endeavor), and is very proud of himself every time he "hits the target."

Earlier today, after he'd gone peepee, I had to go, too, and I told him so.

Raiden: "You're gonna go peepee standing up?"
Mommy: "Nope, I'm a girl so I don't have a penis, so I can't aim like you can. I go peepee sitting down."
Raiden: "You don't have a penis?"
Mommy: "Nope."
Raiden: "What happened??"
Mommy: "Nothing happened; I'm a girl, and girls don't have penises."
Raiden: "Why?"
Mommy: "Boys and girls are just made a little differently."
Raiden: "...Daddy has a penis?"
Mommy: "Yep, Daddy has a penis."
Raiden: "You don't have a penis?"
Mommy: "Nope."
Raiden: "Because you're a girl?"
Mommy: "That's right."
Raiden: "You go peepee sitting down."

This was a command; he left the bathroom and shut the door behind him.

We had a bit of a review of this topic at bedtime, after he went peepee standing up again.

Raiden: "The little boy at JumpMania has a penis?"
Mommy: "Yep."
Raiden: "The little girl at the fireworks, she doesn't have a penis?"
Mommy: "That's right, she doesn't."
Raiden: *holding up Bunny Bear* "Bunny Bear has a penis?"
Mommy: "Yep, because he's a boy."

Best not to confuse him with the non-anatomy of stuffed animals at this point, I think.

Personally, I just can't wait for him to ask MIL and FIL about it tomorrow, without them having any clue that we've had this discussion *grin*.

Reading!

My kid.

This weekend, he started reading.

Words.

Last weekend, I realized that, since he knows his letters (we're still working on lower case, but he knows most of them), he could help me read the words "I" and "a".

Well, this weekend, I decided to try him out with two-letter words. The first one, "Oh," was easy enough, I figured. Two letters, one sound, the sound being that of the first letter. Not much different than "I" or "a". It was easy for him, so I asked if he wanted to learn another word, and he did. We went with "We." And from there we just kept adding more words, either when I felt like he was ready to, or when he would ask to learn a new word.

The grand total: I, a, oh, we, so, my, no, me, you, and, go. We tried "is" but he had a hard time with that one for some reason.

I am so proud of him! And he's proud of himself, too. Anytime he'd remember a new word, he would turn his head up at me and smile and we'd hug and it was fabulous. My son, my barely three-year-old son, is learning to read! Words! It makes me pretty much not wanna do anything else with him, lol. I definitely want to keep this up, as I know if I don't, it could be lost really easily. And if I do? He'll be reading One Fish Two Fish to me by the end of this year.

I'm thinking we can add in The Cat in the Hat, too, since there's much more word repetition in that book. One Fish Two Fish is pretty random.

And then I can make sight word flash cards and make a matching game with words and pictures and my child, he is fabulous.

It's so fun. It takes forever to get through a book, so we've had to adjust to only reading half a book or so at bedtimes, but it is so. fun. Reading through a book, pointing at the words as I'm reading them, stopping on the words he knows and letting him read them. The phrase, "Oh, me! Oh, my! Oh, me! Oh, my!" he can read all of, all by himself.

Proud mommy, right here.

How it happens.

I discovered a couple of new blogs the other day. One, a blog where anyone can submit their "drive-by meddling" stories of well-meaning strangers offering them unsolicited parenting advice -- That Baby Looks Cold! -- and another, found via a story posted on the former, generally relating the funny things that happen when you're raising small children -- Parenting Ad Absurdum.

The post that particularly caught my eye was this: How I was totally judgmental before I had kids.

In short, the author relates that before you have kids, you judge parents you see out in public, based on the small glimpse you're given of their day, their kids, and the way they handle them; yet once you have kids of your own, you start understanding how the frazzled parent who snapped at their youngster for something seemingly small, or the parent blatantly ignoring their child asking them questions, or the parent with the clearly-underdressed-for-the-weather child could have gotten to that point.

I had a friend tell me recently that his wife -- they are childless, I might add -- couldn't believe some of the parenting she'd seen going on while she was out one day. One example was of a child screaming at his mother in the restroom that he didn't want to go potty and you can't make me etc., and the mom just sort of ignoring it and dragging him along, anyway. I will admit, even having a child of my own, I judged the mom being described -- if the kid doesn't have to pee, don't make him pee, and why are you letting him scream at you like that??

Fast forward a couple of weeks, to the Friday after my father-in-law's birthday. We were to have a family dinner at a buffet place nearby -- myself, my husband, my parents-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my grandmother-in-law, along with, of course, my three year old son, who, I found out early during dinner conversation, had refused to take a nap that day. (Note: my parents-in-law watch my son during the day.)

"I wanna go with Mommy!" *clings to Mommy's leg; Mommy and he go to get a plate of food*

"NO I wanna go find Papa!" *yanks hand out from Mommy's grip, runs into a crowd of people, shrieks when Mommy calls his name to Come Back Here Right Now*

"NO I WANT PAPA TO DO IT!" *sees Papa, runs to him, Papa says he'll take care of it*

Back at the table, the plate Papa filled for him is in front of his chair, which he refuses to sit in. "I wanna sit with Papa!" Fine. "I don't wanna take a bite!" Fine. What do you want? "I don't want ANYTHING! I'm full! I'm all done! I want down!" Well, we're all still eating, please sit at the table until everyone is finished, and then we'll go. "No I want cake!" You'll have to eat some healthy food before we get cake. You have fish and green beans on your plate, let's take a few bites. "No I'm full! I want cake!" You can have cake, after you eat some healthy food first. "I'm full! I want down!" Please stay in your chair.

Daddy goes for seconds, and then Papa, while Mommy here still has the same food on her plate from Round One, with about 4 bites taken, total.

"I wanna go with Daddy!" Sorry buddy, Daddy already walked too far away, we'll let him know next time. "No I'll go find Daddy!" There are too many people around and I don't want you to get lost; please wait here for Daddy. "I wanna go with Papa!" Heavy sigh. I take bite number five.

After having generally everything argued with, I stopped responding except for occasionally reaching over to grab his arm and hold him in place in his chair, which would, of course, make him scream. Finally realizing that nothing he was doing was getting the desired response, he pulled out his golden ticket: "I need to peepee!"

I put down my fork, because I am that mom on A Christmas Story who doesn't get to eat her own hot meal, I grimace at my husband because of course there's no notion that anyone other than Mommy could take a child to the bathroom, he smiles apologetically while eating his second plate of food while my first is less than 1/4 eaten so far, I grab my son and we walk nicely to the restroom. On the opposite end of the restaurant.

Before we even make it to the restroom, I'm already hearing protests of "No I don't want to peepee!" which I ignore. We walk into the bathroom (of a buffet joint. on the low-income end of town. in which the floor is sticky.) and my son is doing his damnedest to pull out of my grip, screaming at me "No! I don't want to peepee! I don't want to peepee!"

And suddenly I am reminded of both the blog post I stumbled across, and the mother witnessed by my friend's wife.

I am that mom.

I turn to the lady in the restroom who is washing her hands and pretending to ignore us and tell her flatly, "This is after he insisted that he needed to go." She smiled an "I'm a mom, too, I get it" smile and left, thankfully leaving the entire restroom empty so that I could beat my child within an inch of his life and have no witnesses.

Kidding.

Instead, he got a very stern talking to about how I listened to him and he told me he had to peepee, I was trying to be a good responsible Mommy and take care of him by getting him to a potty, and it was not nice to tell me he needed to peepee and then yell at me for taking him. He stopped screaming and used the potty. We washed hands, used the air blower to dry them (which he loves), and I thought to myself, Good, we have an understanding now.

Which, of course, we didn't.

We got halfway back to the table before he was pulling out of my hand again and running away into crowds of people again and yelling at me for asking him to stop again and demanding to sit with Papa and not eat any of his food again and proclaiming that he needed cake again and finally, after e-freaking-nough of that, and after he started just plain screaming rather than even screaming words at me, I proclaimed myself Done.

I stood up, grabbed my purse, grabbed my screaming child, left my 2/3-full plate of food on the table, and walked out of the restaurant.

He was, would you believe, screaming at me the entire walk out to the car. I was not responding to him in the slightest because I knew if I did, I would freaking lose it on him. My primary concern at that moment was simply making it to the car instead of throwing him in front of one.

Kidding, again.

We got to the car, I jostled him around but did not put him down, no freaking way to dig through my purse-that-eats-car-keys to get the car keys, unlocked the car, put him straight into the car seat, battled flailing arms and legs to buckle him in, moved to the front seat, and planned to sit there for as long as it took for my husband to come out with us but I was not talking to him anymore. Scream away, kid, Mommy's checked out. Mommy's sitting in the front seat in her happy place where there are no screaming children and she gets to finish a meal without being asked to wipe anyone's nose.

My husband wasn't too far behind us -- had apparently just taken enough time to apologize for our son's behavior -- and once he started sternly talking to our child about What He Had Just Done and Why That Was Not Okay, with information comprehensible by a 3-year-old such as "That was Papa's birthday and you made Papa SAD and made Mommy and Daddy MAD by screaming, fighting, and not listening!" The child argued back, "I wasn't all done yet! I'm still hungry!" and uh oh, he said the wrong thing, and my MadMommy floodgate was broken.

I wasn't all done yet either and I'm still hungry too and I just wanted to eat dinner and have a nice boy and Papa just wanted to have dinner with his family and you were NOT A NICE BOY and you made us SAD AND MAD and YOU SAID YOU WERE ALL DONE AND DIDN'T TAKE BITES AND YOU WEREN'T SITTING IN YOUR CHAIR AND... well, etc.

By the end of the 10-minute drive home, he had fallen asleep.

Well, that explains it. Tired, plus the fact that his argumentative side comes out in an exponential factor correlating with however many adult authority figures are around for him to see if they really mean it.

And that, folks, is why that mom was dragging her kid into the bathroom even though he was screaming that he didn't want to go, and why she wasn't responding to it at that point to try and get him to stop screaming.

At that point, putting a jacket on him for a short walk to the car in chilly weather is just a battle not worth fighting today.

Has anybody seen my baby?

He used to look like this:



But now all I can find is this big kid.

---

He can recognize all the capital letters and the numbers 0-9. He can count to 18 unassisted. He can sing ABCs and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star all by himself, and a lot more songs along with someone. He makes up his own songs sometimes. And he asks me to sing William Tell Overture, by name. He knows 15 states on the US map, and can point out the stigma, style, petals, anther and filament on a tiger lily. If I don't know the answer to something he asks me, he says, "Let's look it up!" and sits on my lap with the laptop so we can find it out.

He's currently in love with Toy Story (both 1 and 2), and for his birthday he kept asking for "the Woody with a string that talks, because my Woody doesn't have a string." He got him, and has barely put him down since his party yesterday; they're currently taking a nap together in MommyDaddy's bed. I love that he was happy with the Toy Story books the Easter Bunny left him this morning, too.

He also has a fondness for The Incredibles (though we've pared down his watching time on that one, due to his obsession with guns), and due to a certain youtube video he often tells us, "I ate too much, I can't put my belt on." He also hasn't let the lack of a "red suit" stop him from putting on an imaginary red suit, complete with imaginary gloves, mask, and boots, several times a day, and announcing, "I'm a superhero!"

Speaking of movies, he can turn on the TV, put a DVD in the DVD player, and turn it on, all by himself. He can also take out the DVD, and turn everything off. He's shown both of his grandmas and two of our friends how it all works, when they didn't know.

My favorite things about him right now, are that he likes to wake me up by caressing my face and saying, "Mommy, open your eyes," and that he often asks in the morning or when we get home from work, "You're happy to see me?" He's very aware of others' feelings, and is good about expressing his own. Last night I turned off the water before he was done washing hands, and he told me "You hurt my feelings, I wasn't done yet."

He's a good eater - eats plenty of healthy foods, with his favorites including stir fried broccoli, apples and peanut butter, and "cold toast" (a.k.a. bread). He'll try anything new, and has loved a lot of the vegan recipes we've made recently. Sure, he loves hot dogs and mac & cheese like any other kid, but he definitely doesn't limit himself to them. The other night I asked what he wanted for dinner, and he answered, "Miso soup, and sushi, and rice, and broccoli." He stuffs himself silly at the Indian buffet. And candy? He'll take a few bites, then proclaim himself "All done."

He still doesn't sleep all night, but I'm used to it and have become fond of it. It won't be that many more years he'll want to snuggle Mommy at night, and I think I'd miss it if he stopped asking. Daddy, I'm sure, feels differently :). He does fall asleep in his own bed by himself now, though, and that's a huge improvement.

I brag about him often.

I really, really love this kid, and I'm glad he chose me to be his mommy.

Happy third birthday, buddy.

Tasty discoveries on a vegan diet.

So, as it turns out, this whole vegan thing isn't nearly as difficult as I'd anticipated. And on top of that, I actually kind of like it.

We are cooking at home more and eating out less. This was one of my primary goals with the decision to go vegan for Lent: break terrible, lazy habits about food. I don't know how many evenings in our household went something like, "I dunno, whadda you wanna do?" until we were starving and decided, "Fine, Taco Bell again?" Being vegan -- especially being vegan and eating gluten free -- we have about three viable options for eating out:

1. Taco Bell, still. A bean burrito minus cheese (for the husband, who is not gluten intolerant); triple layer nachos minus cheese; or pintos and cheese, minus cheese.
   
   
2. McAlisters. Spud Olé, with veggie chili, no cheese, no sour cream or butter. Or just a bowl of veggie chili itself.
   
   
3. Qdoba. Grilled veggie burrito (naked for me), with only salsa and guacamole for toppings.

None of which are bad, but all of which get very old very quickly. I'm pretty done with Taco Bell atm, and McAlisters and Qdoba are too pricey to do very often. So we're cooking more at home.

And because we're cooking more at home, with an altered diet to pay attention to, that means we're trying a ton of new recipes, being a lot more creative with what we're making, and eating a lot more vegetables than we had been. We don't feel the need to have meat every meal and top everything with cheese or sour cream or whatever other additives, either, which has been pretty eye opening about what we didn't need before that we were simply in the habit of doing, anyway.

This also means that we're both slimming down! Which neither of us will complain about, thanks. (...Of course, I'm a terrible cook, so a lot of the nights I cook instead of Rich, we'll also have smaller portions, because "tolerable" does not lend itself to being overeaten.)

Some of the recipes we've encountered or otherwise concocted for ourselves, have been pretty dang good, if I do say so myself. For example, enchiladas without cheese, covered in homemade enchilada sauce that doesn't use broth, filled with refried (or simply mashed) beans, veggies and rice, are fabulous. Neither of us even missed the cheese, or the meat. They were tasty, and filling, and there was no problem finishing off the leftovers.

Also? Vegetable pakoras. Holy. Crap. I could eat this every day. The two year old loved them, too, for the record. And being gluten intolerant and loving Indian food meant we actually had all the batter ingredients on hand. We did it a little differently than the recipe says to, though, based on what we've had (and liked) at the local Indian restaurant. Rather than cutting up cauliflower and slicing onion rings to dip into the batter and then fry, instead we shredded together (thank you, food processor grating attachment) carrots, mushrooms, yellow squash, cauliflower, and broccoli -- basically, what we had in the fridge and needed to use -- and then mixed the shredded veggies into the batter, and deep fried spoonfuls of the mixture. Rich said that he held it in place on the spoon for 30 seconds before dropping it into the oil, so it would sear around the outside and hold together better. Super, super tasty.

Another recent favorite is vegan bean taco filling. The toddler thought they were a little spicy the first round, so I cut back the cayenne the second round and it seemed to work better. (Yes, I cooked this, and it still turned out good! That says a lot.) Different salsas would give different flavors and spice levels, I'm sure, too. (The first time I made them, I thought we were out of salsa so I used Ro-Tel. The second, I'd found salsa, but it was Medium, so still a bit spicy.) The husband found the mushy bean texture combined with the crispy taco shell to be a little weird for him, so he, instead, steamed some corn tortilla flours and made it into a burrito or soft taco instead. He also whipped up some guacamole to top them with, and, the second time I made them, I planned ahead and got some fresh spinach (we rarely, if ever, use lettuce for anything) and alfalfa sprouts to put in the tacos as well. Because we're hippies. But I liked it, so there. In fact, some of the leftovers are sitting in the work fridge right now, just waiting for me. Taunting me.

The husband also whipped up some makeshift "pie," because we had both a sweet potato and a butternut squash that had been bought with the best of intentions, but were starting to go bad. He sliced and steamed them, then used a recipe for pumpkin pie to determine which spices to use, and used vanilla almond milk instead of evaporated or sweetened condensed milk or whatever it is that pie calls for. (For crust, he just mixed together rice flour, Smart Balance Light margarine, and oil. It dried out a bit too much but worked.) We didn't add eggs, obviously, so it didn't firm up, but the flavor was still there. He'd made enough that we've been eating the rest like pudding :). Since, I've found some recipes for vegan egg replacements, some involving starches, some involving flax. Maybe next round, we'll try one of those.

For the quick and easy end of things, we've discovered Tasty Bite brand microwaveable Indian food. We've had other microwaveable Indian foods before, with um... little success. But every single one of these that we've tried, has been excellent. Of course, not every meal is vegan, nor is every meal gluten free, but guess what: it is clearly labeled on the back of the packaging! At one glance, we can clearly find "vegan" and "gluten free," along with "vegetarian," "no MSG," and a few other options I can't remember off the top of my head. Let me tell you, this makes life easy. Some meals you have to dump into a bowl and then nuke for 90 seconds, others you can heat in the package for 90 seconds and then dump into a bowl, so it's six of one, half a dozen of the other on that, really. I do think they seem a little runny, but if you add rice, that problem is solved. (The microwaveable brown Minute Rice is nice, though I keep meaning to make up a large pot of my own brown rice to stick in the fridge for such occasions. Really, I'm not big on microwaveable stuff at all, and used to not even own a microwave, but when it comes to needing to eat at work and such, well, sometimes isn't terrible, and I just try not to do it often.)

Of those, the husband favors the Bombay Potatoes, and my favorite is the Channa Masala. We also bought the Pad Thai simmer sauce, which was used as another "what veggies do we have in the fridge that need to be used?" type of dinner, and was also a success. Again, the toddler approved. I do wish we'd planned ahead and baked some tofu to toss in with it, but oh well, there's always next time.

---

It's less than a week now until the end of Lent. Frankly, we expected the transition from a standard American diet to a vegan diet to be a lot more difficult than it was. It's gone well enough for us, that we actually want to continue this type of diet... mostly. I feel that our purposes for trying this diet have been met -- we're eating healthier, eating more veggies, cooking more at home, and wasting less money eating out. It's easier to turn down treats at work because they are typically in cookie or cupcake form, and it feels good to be able to say no. We both feel better, and as I said, we're both slimming down. But like I said at the start of this, I do think that humans are biologically built to need some meat. So, here's what we've decided:

1. Since eating a vegan diet has helped us turn down foods that we should probably be turning down anyway (given my gluten intolerance and his sugar processing issues), we will continue to eat a vegan diet while out of the house.
   
   
2. At home, we will primarily eat a vegetarian diet, mostly because the husband feels like he is going to die without eggs. This will still probably mean a good portion of vegan dishes, as not everything needs milk, cheese, or egg. And since we'll be using less of it, anyway, I personally would like to justify the expense of only getting free range eggs, but we'll see how long that lasts, because we're also cheap. I'm thinking I may continue to skip dairy entirely... or at least for the most part. I'm actually kind of curious to see, now that it's been out of my system for a while, if I have a reaction to it the way I think I might.
   
   
3. Once or twice a month, we will treat ourselves whether at home or at a nice, good quality restaurant, to some kind of meat something. This will also include birthday outings with our friends, so they don't have to accommodate for us weirdos. But we don't want this to revert us back to lazy habits of, "Eh, it's almost been a month, I'm hungry and lazy, do you wanna just grab some burgers?" If we're going to eat meat, it will be good quality meat.

Notice I said I want to eat a "primarily vegan/vegetarian diet." I do not want to be "a vegan" or "a vegetarian" who "cheats" on occasion. Mostly, because I don't want to label myself, and then feel like I have to justify eating anything "a vegan" or "a vegetarian" wouldn't eat. As I said before, I'm doing this because of how foods affect my body, not to save the planet. I just want to be healthy. And I think eating some meat, sometimes, is healthy. I'm just very glad I broke the mindset that meat and dairy have to be everywhere for something to be a balanced meal.

Vegan.

The short backstory: We're going vegan for Lent, which started yesterday. No, we're not Catholic (or anything, really), but a friend of ours is, he is going vegan for Lent, and we've thought about trying it temporarily anyway to see if it makes our bodies feel better, so we're doing it with him, because why not?

Rich has been looking up recipes, and I've been looking up more the health end of it - what do we need to watch out for? what do we need to be sure to incorporate into our diet? etc. What's irritating is that any information I've found about vegan health is surrounded by SAVE THE ANIMALS!! and CRUELTY FREE THIS and SCARE TACTIC THAT and really, it does suck how animals are handled in the mass-producing meat industry, and it would be fabulous if everything were free-range and done the old fashioned way, but that's not why weare wanting to go vegan for a while. I want to see if I feel healthier. I know that animals are given crap food and produced in crap, and that the crap is passed onto my body, and maybe I'm selfish, but I'm more concerned about what happens in my body as a result of that. Scare tactics don't convince me to stay vegan, they convince me to stop bothering to dig through all of it to find the information I'm actually looking for. You'd think, too, that if the scare tactics are out there specifically to convince people to become vegetarians/vegans, that they'd also provide a great deal of information on how to do so healthily. But maybe that's just me.

Personally, I'm not convinced that strict veganism is really what we're built for, anyway. We have canine teeth. Those are meat-eating teeth. But we only have a few of them, not a full mouth of them the way lions or whatever do, so that tells me we're only supposed to eat a little bit of meat, not nearly as much as is typically in the standard American diet. I read something recently that said, I think, that meat should only be 1/8th of our diet? I know people who eat pretty much only meat (hello Atkins diet), and that's never seemed healthy to me, anyway. But conversely, lots of vegan stuff I've read (around the scare tactics) say that you have to have a multivitamin supplement and to be really careful that you're getting enough B12. If you can't get all the vitamins/minerals you need from eating "healthy," it is obviously lacking something, and again, biologically, shows me that it's just not what our bodies are built for.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter much considering we're really only doing this for 40 days. To start with, anyway. We've tossed around the idea of if it goes well and if we do feel significantly better, staying at leastmostly vegan or mostly vegetarian, tossing in meat once a week or so, but not making a big deal out of it. I'd like to find free-range meat, if we go that route, too, to eliminate some of the yucky stuff that goes into mass produced meat, but we'll see what happens with that. Rich thinks he'll die without eggs, is really where the "mostly" part of it comes in, but when I was pregnant with Raiden I couldn't stand eggs in any form, or even the smell of them, and I haven't cared for them much since then, so I won't miss them. Cheese leaves a metallic aftertaste in my mouth and I'm just as happy with almond milk as I am cow milk so meh, I think I could stay vegan and be just fine, I've just been too lazy to do it.

And that's really what I'm hoping Lent will do for us, too: help us build better habits. We're just lazy when it comes to food. Well, and busy. We have so much stuff going on in the evenings, and Raiden goes to bed at 8, so taking a lot of time to cook just doesn't fit in our schedules very well. When we remember to cook big meals on the weekend and eat leftovers throughout the week, it works better, but that doesn't always happen, either. Having 40 days where it will actually be more difficult to eat out (gluten free vegan fast food? sure.) will, I hope, just get us in the damn habit of cooking food at home, and making meal plans and shopping for groceries so we don't play the "I dunno, what do you wanna do?" game all the time. I think we just need to see that we CAN do it and stop talking about how we SHOULD and then go to Taco Bell (where we can feed the 3 of us for $5).

Rich and I sat down this weekend and made a list of the meals we want to try this week, the ingredients we'd need, and then went shopping for them. That's further than we usually get, ha. On the agenda for this week: baba ganoush, falafel, aloo gobi (potato and cauliflower curry), aloo tikka (Indian potato cakes, basically), cauliflower soup, and I'm hoping to make some plantain zucchini bread that there was a recipe for in the Fruit Day Cookbook I picked up from the School of Metaphysics over the weekend. I'm hoping to lean more in a squash direction next week, and to try bittersweet vegan's gf vegan chocolate chip cookies for Guy Night, where there are usually a thousand snacky cakes in sight.

Yesterday morning, I stopped by the grocery store on the way to work (I was already 15 minutes late, why not make it 20?) to grab some Silk coffee creamer, and almond milk to put on my cereal (which I tossed into a lidded container at home, because I was already late and didn't have time to make cream of rice as I'd intended). For lunch, I had an Amy's brand gf vegan baked ziti microwave dinner (which was pretty good), and some sugar snap peas to snack on (because I loooove them). For dinner, since we actually weren't terribly busy, which is rare, we tried our first attempt at falafel; it had a good flavor, and the toddler even approved, but it was kind of mushy in the middle. I'm looking up other recipes today to see if there's something we should do differently next time.

Today I had cream of rice for breakfast, will have leftover falafel for lunch, and I believe we're doing Thai peanut noodles for dinner - a boxed kit, that we'll just toss some tofu and veggies into as well.

At this point, I'm still optimistic about all the good this 40 days can do us, as far as cleaning out our systems, feeling healthier, building better (or, any) cooking habits, and frankly, just showing us that we CAN be healthier and more responsible should we actually choose to. Besides, trying new recipes is always fun, anyway :).